by Amelia Stone
But the truth was that I wanted to know what it was like to give your heart to a woman so completely, and to know she’d given you hers in return. It made me a total sap, I knew that. But I didn’t care. I wanted to fall in love.
And maybe I wanted to prove, to the little doubtful voice in the back of my mind, that love could fill you up without consuming you entirely, without destroying everything that was good in you.
“So the entirety of their estate passed to Daniel once they both died,” Larkin said, pulling me out of my thoughts. “He’d never even met them. They refused to acknowledge their daughter’s marriage, refused to even see their grandkid. It was like he never existed for them.” She huffed. “Until they died.”
I let out a low whistle. “I can see how that would be complicated.”
She nodded. “The thing is, Ernesto – his dad,” she explained, when I raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t deserve any of their abuse. He was the best man I’d ever known. Always so kind and supportive, and so hard-working. He wasn’t looking for a sugar mama. He just fell in love.”
I frowned as I watched her tell me about her father-in-law. She looked so sad, and I couldn’t help but notice that she used the past tense.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
She frowned. “He died four years ago. Heart failure.” She sniffed, pushing her plate away. “Daniel was devastated. It came out of nowhere. He was only forty-five, and healthy as an ox.”
I sighed. “Heart problems can happen to anyone, even if they seem healthy.”
I thought of my mom, who had been active every day of her life. Walking all over town in all weather, swimming all through the summer, climbing the stairs in our little two-story house with the vigor of a woman half her age. Until one Sunday, when she was in the garden. She’d been picking herbs to make spaghetti and meatballs.
Ellie and I had been coming over for dinner every Sunday, ever since we both moved back to New York after college. We loved spending time with her, but we also both felt the need to check up on her. Ellie would sit and crochet with her, cheerfully grilling her about her health, while I did whatever needed to be done around the house. In fact, I’d been changing out the light bulb over the stove when I saw Mom through the window, clutching at her left arm as she fell to the ground.
It had been the first of three heart attacks that summer. The last one had ultimately taken her life.
Larkin nodded. “Yeah. Turned out, it was some kind of congenital defect. He didn’t even know about it until it was too late.”
“What happened to his mom?” I asked.
“She moved to Florida a few months after Ernesto died. Took some of her parents’ money and made a new life for herself.” She stared into the distance again. “Haven’t seen her since Daniel’s funeral.”
“That’s sad.” I wasn’t sure what else to say.
She hummed. “Yeah.”
We were quiet for a while, both lost in our thoughts. I finished eating, while she merely picked at her food. When it became clear that she wasn’t going to eat any more, I got up, taking both our plates with me. I loaded everything up in the dishwasher, then ran the disposal.
“I’m sorry,” she said, when I was done.
I frowned. “For what?”
She gestured to the sink. “For not finishing my dinner. You went to all this trouble to cook, and I didn’t eat it all.”
I shook my head. “You did pretty good.”
She gave me a wry smile. “Thanks, mom.”
I chuckled. “I mean it. You ate almost all of it.” I reached into the fridge, pulling two more bottles from the six-pack of craft beer I had stashed in there. I popped the tops off, then motioned for her to follow me as I crossed to the French doors leading out to my backyard.
“Yeah, I guess I did,” she said, sounding surprised. “I was actually pretty hungry tonight.”
“You say that like you haven’t eaten all day.” She made a face, and I stopped, handing her a beer. “You didn’t eat all day?”
She shrugged, her shoulders folding in on herself in a defensive move. “I had a banana this morning.”
I laughed. “It’s eight o’clock!”
She checked her watch. “Seven forty-seven,” she corrected.
“Whatever.” I smiled. “A banana is not enough sustenance for an entire day.”
She looked at her watch again. She did that a lot, and I wondered why. Somehow, it didn’t feel like she did it out of boredom or impatience, like most people. Her expression when she did it was one of concentration. Maybe she was keeping track of something? But what?
“Especially not if you spent the day doing doorbell-killing exercises, right?” she asked.
I laughed. “Strength training does require protein to fuel the workout.”
She looked up at me, her eyes smiling. “I guess a gym rat like you knows all the tricks of the trade, huh?”
I winked. “Stick with me, buddy. I’ll beef you up in no time.”
She smiled. “Well, if involves eating stuff like the meal you just made, then sign me up.”
We’d reached the end of my property and the beginning of the canal, and I gestured for her to sit. She did, dangling her legs off the bulkhead. I settled myself next to her, taking a sip of my beer.
“Good thing the water doesn’t come too high,” she said, peering over the edge of the dock, noting the salty stains in the boards that had been left by the high tide. They were probably a good ten inches below her dangling feet.
“Easy for you to say, your legs are shorter.”
She snorted. “Jealous, Stretch?”
I gave her a long look, top to bottom, pretending I was unimpressed. “Nah. I’m good.”
She smiled. “I don’t know if I’d go as far as ‘good.’” She gave me the once-over, too, then shrugged like she was bored. “You’re all right.”
“Keep telling yourself that, shorty.”
“I am not short.” She stuck her tongue out at me.
“Everyone’s short to me.”
She laughed, and I joined her. Man, it felt good to just sit here, laughing with this woman. The conversation tonight had been all over the map, but this was a good place to land. Eventually the laughter died down, and we continued to sit for a few minutes, just enjoying the light breeze blowing in from the water.
“It’s a beautiful night,” I observed. It was warmer than usual for late October, and though the light pollution meant you couldn’t see many stars, the sky was a mosaic of inky blue and purple trails, and the nearly full moon caught the edges of the clouds, turning them a shimmering silver.
“That it is,” she said, her tone heavier than it had been a minute ago. She sniffed, and I looked over at her. Her chin was wobbling, and her eyelids were moving at a rapid-fire pace.
Shit. She was about ten seconds from bursting into tears.
“Hey,” I said, bumping her shoulder with mine. “Talk to me.”
She shook her head, biting her lip. She was obviously struggling to get herself under control. Her knuckles were white as she gripped her beer bottle, and I gently took it from her hands, setting it to the side.
“Hey.” I put my arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
“No. No I’m not,” she gasped, just as the tears began to fall.
God, I hated this. She was sobbing, her whole body shaking violently, and I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know what to say to make her sorrow go away. I’d tried to help her forget, plying her with steak and beer and meaningless banter until she was smiling and laughing with me. But it hadn’t worked.
So I did the only thing I could think to do – I pulled her into my lap, wrapping my arms around her and holding her as tight as I dared.
After an interminable amount of time, her shaking stopped, and I found I was rocking us both, murmuring nonsense words, telling her she was okay. Which was bullshit. Clearly she wasn’t.
“We had a fight,” she mumbled, the sound m
uffled by my shirt.
My hold tightened on her for a fraction of a second as I inhaled. But I breathed out again, relaxing ever so slightly. Still, I didn’t dare speak for fear she’d stop talking.
“We had a fight,” she repeated in a stronger voice. “That morning.”
I didn’t have to ask which morning. She was talking about Daniel, about the day he’d died.
“God, it was bad.” She cleared her throat. “Knock-down, drag-out. A fight to end all fights.”
She sniffed, wiping her face on my sleeve. I didn’t care. She could get all the snot and tears and whatever she wanted on my shirt. It would wash out. The more important thing was that she washed this out, this pain and grief. She needed to talk about this, and I was happy to listen.
“I have always had a temper.” Her voice was faraway, distant, like she was still trapped in her own head. “I’m not an easy person to love. I’m antisocial. I’m argumentative. And I have this contrary streak, my dad says. You say up, I say down. You say white, I say black.” She sniffed again, but it sounded more like a huff of laughter. “My brother and I fought like cats and dogs when we were growing up. Still do, really.”
She was silent for a minute, and I waited her out, afraid to even breathe too loudly. I just continued to rock her, lulling her into a sense of security. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to be a safe place for her to lay her burdens down.
“But then Daniel came along, and it was like he swept away the anger, you know what I mean?” She didn’t wait for me to answer before continuing. “It wasn’t like I was changing myself for him, or trying to become a different person to please him. It was like he brought out a side that was always there, waiting for him.”
She was quiet for a beat, and I silently held her, waiting her out.
“All of a sudden, there just wasn’t anything to argue about. From the minute we met, we agreed on everything. What to eat, where to go on a Friday night, what movies to watch. It was like we shared a brain. If I said we should watch He-Man, that was his favorite cartoon. If he wanted enchiladas, that was all I’d been craving for days. It was bizarre, how in sync we were.” She snorted. “People hated us. We were too perfect.”
I frowned. I kind of hated them, too. Well, hated him. It was stupid, I know, being jealous of a dead guy. But if I’d learned anything in the last twenty-four hours, it was that Larkin’s husband cast a long shadow.
“That morning, I told him I wanted to paint the guest bedroom green. I had a swatch all picked out. I was so excited to show him.”
It was seemingly a non-sequitur. But the tension in her shoulders and the agony in her voice told me we were getting close to the truth of it, the hemorrhaging center of her grief. She was silent for a long time, and I could feel her heartbeat racing against my chest. Eventually, I cleared my throat, unable to contain my curiosity any longer.
“He didn’t like the color, I take it?”
For a long minute, I thought she wouldn’t answer me. But when she did, her tone was leaden.
“He loved the color green. He even teased me about it that day, said I was sucking up to him by suggesting his favorite color. He used to love to say, ‘Man, you’ve got it bad, Lark.’” She looked up at the sky, and I watched her eyes grow heavy with sadness, her mouth pinched. “And then I fucked it all up.”
I ran my hand through her hair, trying to soothe her. I combed my fingers through it, gently working out all the tangles. Just waiting her out.
“I told him that I thought green was a good color for a nursery,” she continued, so quietly that I almost didn’t hear her. “I said that when we had kids, I didn’t want to find out what the sex of the baby would be. I wanted it to be a surprise.” She sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I thought green would be a good color either way. Wouldn’t matter if it turned out to be a boy or a girl, we’d be set.”
I froze with my hands still in her hair, holding my breath, waiting for what she’d say next.
“He lost his shit. Completely and utterly lost it. I had never seen him so angry. Not ever. He was always such an easy-going guy, but not that morning.” She gulped, blinking again. “He grabbed me by the shoulders and demanded to know if I was pregnant.”
I let out the breath I’d been holding, taking another one in quickly. “Were you?” I asked, hating the desperate edge to my voice. My gut was heavy with a dread I didn’t even fully understand.
She shook her head, and I exhaled loudly. “No. And I tried to tell him that, but he wouldn’t listen. He kept screaming that I was going to get an abortion, that we were never having kids.” The tears started falling again. “I swore up and down that I was just talking about the future, I didn’t mean anything by it. But he just kept going. He could not calm down.”
She swiped at her cheeks, but the tears were falling faster than she could keep up.
“So of course, I lost my shit. I started screaming right back at him, telling him he’d betrayed me.” She looked away, watching the lights from the houses shimmering on the water. “We always said we wanted kids. We talked about it even when we were kids ourselves. We talked about how many we’d have, how close together we wanted them, even discussed names. We were waiting until after we finished college and the business stabilized, because that seemed more responsible. But we both always knew where the future was headed.”
I frowned, feeling less and less guilty for hating the guy. Pulling the bait and switch on her like that, and over something so important? Dick move, Daniel. Dick. Move.
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know why he flipped out. He never said. Just insisted that we were never having kids.”
She went quiet again. I resumed stroking her hair, sifting the soft strands through my fingers.
“So then what?” I asked, when she didn’t speak for several minutes. I didn’t want to push her, but I felt like she needed to be pushed. She needed to get it all out.
She shuddered. “I went for a run. I was so angry. I needed to get out of the house and away from him. We’d both said some really awful shit to each other, and we needed to cool down.”
“And he went out, too?” I prompted, remembering what Taylor had said last night, about how he’d died.
“I told him to wait for me,” she whispered. “I told him to wait until I got back.”
I frowned. “But he didn’t.”
She shook her head, letting out a pitiful whimper. “He took his bike out, even though it was storming.” She started to shake again. “I don’t even know where he went with it. I didn’t see him, and I ran all up and down the boardwalk, where he usually rode. I don’t know. We must have missed each other. I didn’t see-” She sobbed. “I didn’t know, until they rang the doorbell, and told me that he, he was-”
She couldn’t finish, her tears overtaking her, stealing her voice. I tightened my hold on her, holding her while she wept.
“My fault,” she sobbed. “All my fault.”
“Hey.” I squeezed her gently, and she clutched at my shirt. “It’s not your fault.” I kissed the top of her head, trying anything I could to comfort her. “You had a fight. People fight all the time. It doesn’t mean you caused this.”
She wailed. “But it does. I pushed him out into that storm. I killed him.”
“No.” I gripped her as tight as I dared. “You weren’t driving the car. You had no control over what happened. It was an accident.”
But she couldn’t answer me, not anymore. All she could do was cry. And all I could do was keep holding her, until finally the tears subsided. We sat in the moonlight while the tide lapped at the soles of my shoes.
It seemed to work, though. Eventually her body went heavy as the deep, slow breath of sleep overtook her.
I stood up carefully, still holding her in my arms, trying not to jostle her awake. I breathed a sigh of relief when she let out a snuffling breath, burying her head in my chest. Then I carried her into the house, upstairs to my room. I
lay her on the bed, pulling her shoes off. Her limbs immediately curled inwards, save for one arm, which she lifted and tucked under her head. Then she turned her face into the pillow, letting out a deep, sleepy sigh.
I frowned at the sight of her in my bed. This wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured it in my dreams last night. But I didn’t care right then. I simply kicked my own shoes off and climbed in beside her. A huge yawn escaped me as I grabbed the blanket at the end of the bed, settling it over both of us. It had been a rollercoaster of a day.
But despite my bone-deep exhaustion, I had a hard time falling asleep. I lay there for a long time, just watching her sleep. She looked so peaceful, and I wondered if it was because she had unburdened herself a little. I hoped it was. I really hoped she’d feel better now, even if just a little bit.
Before I finally drifted off, a little nugget of guilt pinged through my head. Because despite the horrible circumstances that had led us here, I was still happy to be here in my bed, lying next to the most fascinating, complex woman I’d ever known.
In fact, there was nowhere else I’d rather be. This was heaven.
“I wanna be the one to walk in the sun.”
- Cyndi Lauper, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”
I awoke slowly, coming back to my senses one by one.
Touch: The bedding underneath me was plush, the blanket over me warm and soft. I was more comfortable than I had been in a long time. But I was most definitely on a bed that was not my own. It was soft, yet supportive, and when I flung my arms and legs out, they didn’t hit the edges. King size, maybe?
I was also fully rested, sated, like I’d actually slept my fill for once. That was weird, but not unwelcome.
Smell: Coffee, somewhere in the distance. Downstairs? Who cares? Coffee! Fuck. YES.
Sound: I could hear someone showering in a nearby bathroom. A male voice was singing, but quietly enough that I couldn’t make out the song.